Choose Your Truth

By Jo Miles

Truth is obsolete. May the best lies win.

Low-level "news" agency staffer Bex suspects her coworker Alia is an agent of the criminal faction Choose Truth, which sows chaos with its harmful stories. But when she confronts Alia and her warrior-journalist compatriots, Bex’s own reality may be torn apart forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Water Dragon Publishing
• Release date: Feb 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781959804321

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Choose Your Truth

Jo Miles

Copyright © 2023 by Jo Miles

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, except for the purpose of review and/or reference, without explicit permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design copyright © 2023 by Niki Lenhart

nikilen-designs.com

Published by Water Dragon Publishing

waterdragonpublishing.com

ISBN 978-1-959804-32-1 (EPUB)

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Author’s Note

This story is for all the warrior-journalists and misinformation-fighters out there. Keep doing what you’re doing. The world needs you.

Many thanks to my classmates at Taos Toolbox and especially to instructors Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams for helping me hone this story into its best possible form. I’m grateful also to Lesley Conner and Jason Sizemore of Apex Publications for originally publishing this story, and to Steven Radecki and the team at Water Dragon Publishing for giving it new life in this stand-alone edition. For better or worse, it’s every bit as relevant today as it was when I wrote it in 2018.

Finally, all my thanks and love to Nathan, whose support has never wavered.

Choose Your Truth

There had been an uptick in truth.

Alia’s bosses at Prosperity didn’t expect her to watch the newstories that filled her queue. Her job was to analyze their local mindshare performance, and watching the content only slowed her down. But she watched, anyway. On an encrypted personal connection via her headset, safe from Prosperity’s reach, she tagged each newstory with an extra dimension: true, fake, true. Partially true. Too biased to categorize. Egregiously fake. True.

Far more true ones than usual.

Shockingly, true. She lingered over this particular video, frowning, then glanced up and down the long, antiseptic-white office to make sure none of her coworkers was paying attention to her. They were all heads-down at their own screens. She turned back to the offending newstory.

Three times she watched the execution. A familiar, silver-haired figure stood in the center of a bare concrete room, holding an axe.